I refer to the article Hot Flashing Guide. This guide only works on older motherboards which have only parallel EEPROM chips, which are in DIP40 or PLCC68 packages. However, there are other ways of "hot-flashing" without ripping out the chip when the motherboard has finished booting and inside DOS mode, but you need to buy a cheap EEPROM flasher (cost $50 and below, I think). Straight away you pull out the BIOS chip and place into the flasher and reprogram them, without turning on the computer. After flashing, you place it back of course. Newer motherboards uses 8-pin EEPROM which runs on serial interface (Serial Peripheral Interface). Some of them still uses through-hole package which is DIP-8 and you can reprogram them using a Bus Pirate (different EEPROM has different commands) on a breadboard. However, the surface mounted versions are a bit difficult to handle and you may need prongs or some headers to "latch" on the pins instead. Some motherboards do have headers which you can directly connect using jumper wires to a SPI programmer if you happen to have them. As I have never flashed any BIOS chip on a modern PC before, I had experimented on flashing an SPI EEPROM. They are very straightforward stuff and they are extremely simple to use if you have the right tool. The tool is cheap and easily available from ebay. Just my humble opinion.
I'll collect the related information first before I try to update it. Saw your article when I was preparing for my future PhD project. Meanwhile, if someone has an old motherboard (socket 775) with a busted BIOS, I could experiment on it. I have the tools if the BIOS chip are through-hole.
I have old motherboards but I don't think their BIOSes are busted. Of course, you can always corrupt them!
No problemo. I'm hunting for the newer 8-pin BIOS ones - just for writing the article, and maybe for everyone's curiosity as well. Let me search around any Socket 775 boards for me to mess with. One of the boards I have is a 775 one, but they are still in parallel versions.
